Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles

Off to Germany for two weeks.

Hamburg
Erfurt
Munich
Bavaria

Please do return May 10 !

Sincerely
Don.
With pretzels and beer.

DELIVER US UNITER!

When is someone going to show up to be the Uniter?

Like Jesus, without all the donkeys?

If someone would just declare themselves "The Uniter"
Maybe all this violent bullshit would stop.

The Uniter has a very difficult job to do, but do it (s)he must.

The goal? To get four major religions together, plus the atheists---and call it a day.

What an amazing pan-community the earth will be! Living in harmony!

The Five groups (tribes), in combination, will make a grand post-post modern civilization. Joy will rule the land, sea and air. All important aspects of human endeavor and psychology will be taken care of.

The Uniter will ensure the new paradigm of the new world order by uniting these five groups, for good.

THE UNITER’S FIVE GROUP COMPOSITION:

The Atheists will bring the material clarity.
The Jews will bring the intellectual inquiry.
The Christians will bring the brotherly love.
The Buddhists will bring the peace of mind.
The Muslims will bring the hummus.


It is going to beautiful. Why, I’d even go to war for it, kill anyone who won’t join!

Darwin's Curse

Natural Selection: Among civilized nations, the United States possesses the citizenry that believes in it the least, yet experiences it the most.

Gratitude

I would like to take this blog entry to thank Kennedy, Alito, Roberts, Scalia and Thomas for handing the next presidential election to the Democratic Party.

To trump the health rights of a full grown woman with that of a non-conscious (unwanted) fetus smaller than the size of a gerbil baby— this is an outrage.

Even though second trimester abortions are rare and cumbersome, a woman’s body is her body. Period. It is evident that this decision was made simply because of the reshuffling of Supreme Court personalities. It’s pure politics. And women will fight back.

Personally, if I was a pregnant and I was stressed, poor and carrying a fetus with quite inconvenient DNA—I’d rip out that burden faster than you can say, “If Men got pregnant, all abortions would be legal through kindergarten.”

How on earth can the state take charge of a woman’s right to choose? Are you mad?

How dare you?

And

Thank you.

The pendulum swings back. Always. It’s Physics. It’s going to be lovely.

The Future is GRAND!

I remain optimistic.

Even though human beings will become extinct, I still think carbon based life forms are pretty cool miracles. I think silicone based life forms would be cool, too...but carbon is easier to work with. Human primates being the lead species is just a lot of monkey business. Smart sponges might be cool. If you take a sponge and put it in a blender, its three layers of cells: endo, meso, ecto, will reform into a proper sponge. Not the same shape as the original, but the endo, meso and ecto will migrate to the right layer of the newly formed organism. Some kind of colony, that sponge is. Let one huge sponge take over.

Even though Georgie Bush the Second is an enormous, psychopathic, idiot bully, I am so happy that I am younger than he is and one day I will get to read the headline, “FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH WAS KILLED TODAY BY A PACK OF WILD JACKALS. EVEN HIS HELL DIDN’T WANT HIM.”
A man who hijacks a country, uses it for war profiteering and then smirks and kills people while doing it, well, I am so happy that I have such a great chance of outliving this beast.

Violence, Greed and adherence to fairy tale religion are some of the characteristics natural to Republicans. It is hilarious to watch them get into enormous binds because of these character traits that they name Strength, Industriousness and Faith. To see the mask peel away, to watch strength become violence, to watch industriousness turn into rapacious greed and to see perfectly good brains turn to mush from drinking all that God Kool-Aid...it’s such a show. Though it’s tragic, it’s also kind of funny. And a good laugh is a good laugh. One that should keep us entertained for a while.

As the coyotes fill my neighborhood and the winds blow from the high desert—which never happens after January—and we suffer the driest year on record while New York City receives its heaviest rain storm in three decades---well, you just have to smile and feel warm and cozy, knowing that Mother Earth will take care of herself to get back into balance. I love my Momma.

And though it is a tragedy that a bunch of kids were killed in Virginia---and I am in no way being glib here---you just have to wonder when Americans are going to give up their precious guns. That is going to be such a lovely day.

Just lovely.

April 18, 1974

We had a substitute. Man is she mean! Her last name is Mare, people call her nightmare, I call her a horror movie. I was holding a kid’s 30 cents and I lost it, so I owe him 20 cents cause I gave him 10 cents today. This girl Sonia likes me. I fooled around a lot with Wendeye and some little kids and Greg and John. Well Goodnight

I vaguely remember the bad sub. She was nasty. I wrote cents in the entry as a c with a line through it. I miss that. It used to be above one of the numbers on the typewriter. Sonia--if it's the only Sonia I remember from my hometown, her mother killed her father and then killed herself when we were seniors in high school. Wendy lived on the top floor of our two family house. Greg is my brother. John was our neighbor. This was Sixth grade.

Hungry Critters Looking for Snacks

While walking my dog tonight, I saw a cat quickly scamper up a driveway across the street. Nothing unusual. But I had an odd feeling it was something bigger than a cat. Then, it scampered back down, with another four legged beast.

It was two coyotes.

I’ve heard that we’ve had coyotes on our street. The paper has also mentioned that my neighborhood has become a bit of a coyote playground. It has to do with there being no water, less food, up in the hills. As the natural rainfall diminishes, the amount of edible life diminishes. The coyotes (they are DOGS after all) come down into the neighborhood to scavenge for trash, pussy cats, maybe Louise!

I picked up my pooch. The coyotes were not afraid of me. I clapped my hands for them to go away. They moved a bit. They behaved as if they were very comfortable on my street. I decided to cut the walk short. I didn’t want to have to face two coyotes springing on my pooch. Funny, they kept enough distance to stay away from big ol’ me and they did not even look at Louise, it seemed. But coyotes, like foxes, can be sly. And I wasn’t taking any chances.

Louise and I arrived home, safely. She finished her business in the back yard.

One day, we all may be like these Mansfield coyotes. Wandering around, looking for food. They did not seem unhappy, the coyotes. In fact, these wild beasts loping along the street, appeared very in synch with the world. Not tamed. So pleasing to watch wild things surviving. It might be interesting if we all become untamed, with a lope that is a part of nature’s workings.

Perhaps the job of conservative administrations is to try to return the human animal back to foraging and hunting for existence. They might just love the hunt. Or to be hunted. I’d hunt them.

And Furthermore...

Since we are animals with advanced abstract thinking, does it not seem plausible that the afterlife is nothing more than the will to live and the survival instinct rolled into an abstract construction?

Good and Green and a Warning

One thing you GOTTA go to:

This site:


Vertical Farm

It’s all about the planet, man! Keep it local. Clean the air. Reforest the planet.



One thing you need to AVOID:

The Movie HOAX. Boo. Though the acting is very good, the movie is tedious.

BananaObamaRama

Two very important things.

Bananas. Basically, guys, we have to stop eating all this food that gets shipped all over the frigging planet. Economies need diversification anyway! So, geneticists, this is where you come in. Make a frigging banana that’ll grow in California. Just do it.
And then, once those are perfected, make a frigging banana that’ll grow in Maine. You can do it. How hard can it be? People just need a nice tasting fruit that peels, loaded with potassium. Come on! You made that ridiculous round seedless watermelon. And apparently, corn is nothing like the original species. Get to it! Food’s gotta go local.
World’s gotta change.

I think Obama is going to be Hilary’s Vice. They’re being quite cordial with each other. I think they know it’s coming down. And if they are a team, I cannot imagine them losing. Of course, I could be completely wrong.

Grindhouse

No matter what you think, no matter what your resistance, no matter how clever and high brow you think you are. Get over it.

And Go See Grindhouse.

Sure, it’s a few hours at the theatre. Double Feature. Like in the old days. Chill your ass out and go to the movies. Make sure there are people there. You want to see this with screaming teenagers.

The first flick is all zombies and machine guns. The second one—Fucking car killing mayhem. And the bitches are so fucking strong---it makes you want to fucking kill someone with your bare fucking hands.

Go see Grindhouse. Don’t resist it. It’s hideous. It’s an homage. Complete with fake previews of awful crappy movies and an ugly restaurant commercial. The two directors are two of the greatest movie guys alive. It’s worth every minute of your bloody life. Gore. Filth. Survival. Evil. More gore. Death. Destruction. Hot, hard fucking bitches.

GRINDHOUSE

A BLOG IS BORN!

My best friend since the beginning of time (okay, since the Seventies) now has a blog. Enjoy it. The first post is a great sneak of the eary goodness. Beautiful and what else would you say? Tell me.


Birds and Art

WELCOME TO THE WORLD!

August Ulysses Kaufman was born Easter afternoon. The proud parents, Leslie and Daniel, endured sixteen hours of labor. Okay, Leslie endured sixteen hours of labor while Dan took care of everything else.
August came into the world of air breathers at 8lbs 7oz (that's a plump bird) and 21 1/2 inches long. Dang beast is big enough for kindergarten!

I don't know how the women of today do it with these big babies. Don't you think pregnant mommas should go back to Martinis and Marlboros? Shrink these body snatchers a bit?

Congratulations! A big bouncing healthy baby! A citizen of Eagle Rock! A white child with rich grandparents! Enjoy the ride, kid.

 

Belly Up

Today, I arrived at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center at 9AM for a slicing.

At 11AM, I was brought into the pre-op, quickly attached to a saline bag. (I actually like the drip. I think it’s the only time my body ends up with the proper electrolytes. That weird, endless LA headache seems to go away.)

The surgery was supposed to be at 11. It didn’t happen until 12:30.

So I had a lot of time to listen. I was lying across from the coffee station in that pre-op room of a thousand movable curtains. I heard a woman getting ready for a second knee surgery to reduce the pain, “But,” the doctor said, “the clicking might still be there.” Another girl, next to me, very young, was getting ready for something or other. She told the nurse that she drinks heavily, socially, only had Tylenol III yesterday and Nighttime Tylenol last night to get to sleep and that she has Gilbert’s disease (turns yellow with jaundice when she’s sick or stressed, just like her father) and in general, sounded a bit silly. Across from me, I could hear the conversation of another patient...getting ready for an abortion. It must have been a bit late in the term and the young woman sounded sad about having this procedure. She talked about seeing a thread that she thought was the umbilical cord in some picture. The doctor told her that there was no cord yet, that it was just the yolk sac. There was mention of a stoma in the cervix through which the procedure would take place, that it was going to be quick. Was this pregnancy entopic? Unwanted? Good baby gone bad? Who knows!

But how weird to listen to all of this. And, how glad am I that I cannot conceive. So much to think about!

I was there for a very simple operation. I had this umbilical hernia. Basically, if one has any hernia at all, one is born with it. It’s, as they say, congenital. It’s just a matter of time before something protrudes. In my case, that happened very young, though I didn’t know it. I basically had a normal inny with a teeny outy in there. That outy wasn’t supposed to be. Who knew? Then, about six years ago, it all started getting quite ugly. And it hurt. And the doctors kept saying, “Just wait. It’s not an emergency.” Eventually, it kept pinging and even turned a bit purple. I made an appointment. The doctor said I should go for it.

Soon after I planned on making a date for the surgery, our electrician who was doing our kitchen, the estimable John Bennett, had to cancel an appointment with us because he had to have emergency surgery because part of his small intestines had protruded through his umbilical hernia, strangulating its blood supply and killing the section. This is apparently very painful and quite deadly if untreated and one of the possible hazards of having an untreated umbilical hernia. They have to go in and cut out that part of the strangled hose.

That did not sound like something I ever wanted to have to face.

So, all the more reason to go under the knife for the simple job of pushing in a little blob of what-not, and sewing up the crevice in the lining.

Done.

I woke up nicely from surgery. Why, I don’t know. But it’s one of my skills. And the day was spent traveling the Vicodin Highway. A very pleasant road trip, indeed.

Boy, am I going to look hot in my bikini this year.

Slice Me Up, Gunther

This morning, at 11 AM, I go under the knife.

What a fun expression. I love strong words with a Germanic base. (Norse, even.)

Knife. Knife. Slice. Knife.

The word says it all.

Knife me. Cut into the flesh. Clean entrance. Knife. Knife.

The doctor puts a KNIFE in the belly.

Such a sharp, clean word. It sounds more like the sound of what it does to flesh than what it would do to a rock or a tree. A knife can clang on a rock. Clang is a great word.

Knife. Strong. Gets the job done. The sharper, the more precise.

I can’t wait to meet my knife.

Free to Be O.C.D.

THE BAD O.C.D.:

I’m so glad I do not need medication for my O.C.D tendencies.

But the question remains: Why do I like the Container Store so much? After finishing our kitchen, we had to buy some shelving to place next to the stacked washer and dryer inside the laundry cupboard that was built with twelve extra inches all along the vertical side for the purpose of detergent and cleaning supplies to rest on neat shelves. We jumped on the ELFA bandwagon. It’s just the coated white bars shelving stuff...but it goes in extremely easily. You just screw in the top cross bar and everything else hangs from it. Fun. Problem solved. And it just feels Swedish and right. In addition, we purchased a little bit of shelf liner for just a couple of shelves (oily things) and a silverware tray. Golden. It all works well.

But in addition, some O.C.D. mania set in. We bought a container or a holder-of-a-something for almost everything else we own. An ironing board and iron holder, a plastic bag dispenser, a sponge holder, all sorts of clips and hooks, a slidey thing for the cleanser basket under the sink, lid holders and spice risers, another big hangy hook, extra collapsible laundry baskets. You name it.

We’re returning all of it. I was not the only guilty party in acquiring all this landfill. A nice O.C.D. guy named Wally helped us to pluck all these crazy things off the shelves even before he designed our very practical ELFA system. Adam, my Recognized-by-the-State-of-California-Domestic-Partner, was just as nuts as I was before we got to the ELFA meat of the matter of our journey, filling up our cart. When we returned home, most of the holders either didn’t fit or were unnecessary or just plain old took up more room than the thing it was supposed to hold. What a load of plastic! It’s so nice that stores these days will take back almost anything. That stuffed gopher. Sure.

Never shop when you’re hungry.

Never go to the Container Store, ever. It just makes you want to box up everything.

And now for THE GOOD O.C.D.:

I had one of those recurring annoying error messages every time I turned off my computer. What could be wrong????

I looked up ccsvchost.exe online (the crux of the error message) and it became clear to me that I had a registry problem. You see---as the years go by and you delete programs from your computer, the registry (the place in the system that makes a list of everything and points things where they need to be pointed, or something) ends up being loaded with all sorts of dead, useless entries. Sometimes, the system reads these as errors. And, having all this old stuff there clogging up the works, slows the machine down. So, what you need is, get ready, A REGISTRY CLEANER! For $29.95, you can buy one and download it and clean your clock. After reading the reviews on CNET.com (my nerdy Bible), I purchased the most highly recommended one, Max Registry Cleaner. It really is wonderful. I did a scan of my registry and it found 1800 items that needed killin’. So I killed them. Then, I scanned my startup menu and got rid of the nonessential items there, making startup faster.

My computer is humming like bird. Though, Max Registry Cleaner now has a little piece in the Startup...which slows the startup down a bit.

As I often say about Norton: The anti-virus IS the virus.

Keep it clean, babies. And at the end of the day for all your productivity, guess what you’ll have? Order and Cleanliness and Dearth of anything else.

And isn’t that what it’s all about?

C02: Look Which Way the WIND is BLOWING

How wonderful, yet ludicrous.

It takes the SUPREME COURT to get the EPA to do their JOB?

The big conflict over what is reality is so saddening. That our chief justice does not even believe there is causality between greater C02 concentrations and global warming is a tragedy. Blinded by the denial about what is happening to our planet, like so many other conservatives, our chief justice QUESTIONS the SCIENCE???

Okay, I’m being a sore winner here. But the win was very close and very infuriating. About half this country is wrong on everything. Thank goodness the about-half is now under 50% as opposed to the six years of being just a hair over 50%. There is much to rejoice. But many men clinging together in a bullying denial is a scary, awful situation.

After the war is over and alternative fuels are developed and gay people can marry sans probleme, what then will the wrong 50% find to despise and destroy?

My guess: Transsexuals and National Parks.

The Hills They Are a-Burnin'

What if the Hollywood Sign had burned down? Would a new sign be built to take its place?

I doubt it.

And we would have been left with no discernible landmarks. The palm tree postcards do not represent any specific place.

The Jetson’s LAX former air traffic control tower would have been really silly as the only remaining iconic structure in this Pacific Gothem. Besides, it’s a frigging airport building.

How about something more personal—perhaps the silicone boob? Too many to be unique.

The divorced blond pushing fifty on Rodeo drive? Why bother! That’s like putting a rat on a flag to celebrate the New York subway.

We have almost nothing. No Eiffel Tower. No Empire State Building. Not even a silly Arch denoting the “Gateway to the West.”

If the Hollywood Sign had burned down, we would have become as indiscernible as our neighbors to the East. Another Monrovia or San Dimas.

Without the Hollywood Sign, Los Angeles would appear only as what it is: a cement town of car washes and 99 cent stores of pure, unplanned function. I do somehow like how unapologetic the place is with its splashing exhaust and slapdash bungalows. It is a poetic city. The civic bone of beauty is so bare. Clarity arrives when there is not much in the way to obfuscate one’s vision. But one does like to hang one’s hat on SOMETHING. The edge of the Y in Holly?

I am glad the sign did not burn. The editorials would have been exhausting. The replacement--maybe something hideously overdone.

I once hiked up to the Hollywood Sign. The letters are very big.